Over the last few months, I have slowly rolled out the new WP Pusher dashboard. First for new-coming customers and recently existing customers were migrated too. It’s been a gradual process moving away from the old systems powering WP Pusher and it has been going smooth so far.

What’s inside?

The main dashboard is where you’ll see a list of all the sites your WP Pusher license is activated on and where you can always download the latest version of the plugin.

The billing area is where you can find and download your WP Pusher invoices. This is also where you can manage your subscription (upgrading it ???? or canceling it ????), add a new credit card or add additional billing info to your invoices.

The account area is where you can update your WP Pusher account information and change your password. (very exciting, I know!)

Why the move?

When I originally started WP Pusher, my philosophy was to buy instead of building. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I’d prefer to buy solutions to power the business instead of building them myself. The 3 main parts of running a WordPress plugin business are a checkout system, a licensing system and an update system. You need a way to get paid, you need a way to limit paid functionality to only paying customers and you need a way to send out new updates to your customers. If you’ve been following WP Pusher for a while, you know that I have experienced a few bumps along the way. In an ideal world you would spend the majority of your time working on the core product – the plugin. In reality, a huge amount of time is spent dealing with these systems around the business. Services you rely on are being acquired and shut down without warning. Minor product updates will break your site without warning. A lot of things can happen without warning. As a business owner, it’s my single responsibility to ensure that these things doesn’t happen. No matter if I buy or sell. That’s why I’ve slowly realised that while the ecosystem revolving WordPress businesses is at its current maturity level, I have to own the whole process. I know that many of my “collegues” in the WordPress plugin business world have come to the same conclusion.

I believe that this move will benefit my customers because it will mean a better product and a better experience. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it.

So that’s one side of the coin. Building myself has another great benefit. By owning the whole process, from checkout to plugin updates, I can add features that would be really difficult to offer beforehand. The process for shipping updates to WP Pusher customers is also much smoother now, which makes my response time to answer bug reports and feature requests much faster. I believe that this move will benefit my customers because it will mean a better product and a better experience. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it.

How to get access?

If you are a new customer, when you purchase a WP Pusher license a password will be emailed to you. If you are an existing customer, you can use the “Reset password” feature, together with the email address you used when you originally purchased your WP Pusher license, to get access.

The new dashboard can only communicate with newer versions of WP Pusher. This means that you should make sure all your sites are running on a recent version of WP Pusher, at least v2.3.0. The old backend systems will still be running for a while, but will be deprecated eventually.

NB. If you have multiple WP Pusher licenses for the same email address, you might in some cases experience issues with accessing the new dashboard. If you do, please reach out to me.